RICHARD MACPHAIL – The Glue That Held Genesis Together

News reached me yesterday of the passing of my friend Richard Macphail, whose memoir My Book Of Genesis I ghost-wrote for him in 2016. He visited our house many times over that summer to tell me all about his life, focusing mainly on his role as tour manager for Genesis and Peter Gabriel, to whom he remained close. Peter wrote a foreword and four of them – Phil Collins was detained elsewhere - turned out for its launch at a bookshop in Holland Park. 

        As is explained on the back cover of his book, Richard was the singer in Anon, the Charterhouse school group that included Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips, which would merge with Peter Gabriel and Tony Banks’ group The Garden Wall to become Genesis. Thereafter he became their one-man road crew, shepherding them from gig to gig, providing a cottage where they could live and rehearse and offering much-needed support when it was most needed. When Peter left, Richard went with him, acting as his tour manager for two years, then took on a similar role with several others, among them Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen, before quitting the rock trade and making a career for himself in alternative energy. 

        His was a great story and I was pleased to be able to help him set it down on paper. On one of his visits to our house we headed off in his car to Christmas Cottage, the small dwelling his parents had owned on Sheephouse Lane at Wotton, about three miles away. The current owner let us look inside, even upstairs where the lads kipped. “Living there were Peter, Tony, Mike, Ant [Anthony Philips], John Mayhew [first drummer] and myself, all of us together in this three-bedroom cottage,” wrote Richard in his book. “What had been my parent’s room had three mattresses on the floor for me, Ant & John. Mike had the little bedroom next to that and what had been my bedroom when I lived there with my parents, which had twin beds, was where Peter and Tony slept.” 

        An enterprising man, Richard published the book himself, selling well over 7,000 copies on the internet or at Genesis fan conventions where tribute bands performed. One or two of them even asked him to mix their stage sound, just as he had done for Genesis in years gone by. The fans looked on Richard as a hero, the sixth member of the group. 

Here we are at the book launch, left to right: Peter Gabriel, Richard, CC, Mike Rutherford, 

Tony Banks and Steve Hackett. 

        It’s my contention that before rock’n’roll tours were conceived, even before those package tours back in the fifties and sixties when anything up to eight acts played on the same bill, the travelling circuses and funfairs of the day relied on men like Richard. Roustabouts, they used to call them. They would tend to the animals, put up the big tops, dodgem rides and waltzers, grab as much cash from the punters as they could, ravish the town’s daughters, then take it all down again and head for the next city. It was a rough, tough, old sort of life, forever on the move, but there was a sliver of romance about it that was hinted at in movies like That’ll Be The Day, with David Essex and Ringo as leery fairground lads on the make, nowhere to hang their hats but plenty of scope for quickies in a filthy caravan. The rock’n’roll road crews of Richard’s era followed the same byways as these circus and fairground roustabouts, inheritors of a proud tradition, bringing pleasure to the masses and fleeing before anyone could catch up with them. 

        That was then. Nowadays the high end rock’n’roll tour industry runs as smoothly as an Olympic figure skater. Concerts are announced anything up to a year in advance, tickets sell out months before the gig, the money banked long before the band has played a note. The acts fly from gig to gig in private jets and employ an army of roadies who travel by luxury coach while drivers – who do nothing else but drive – transport their equipment in huge lorries, all of it packed snugly into flight cases with foam linings. 

        You don’t have to be a fan of Genesis, or even like them very much, to appreciate how men like Richard laid the foundations for today’s multi-billion pound rock tour industry. In 1967, when Genesis started out, they had just one roadie, and that was Richard. Night after night he was first in and last out; he drove, he carried, he cooked, he fetched, he set up the gear and he took it down again, he strung the guitars, he mixed the sound, he fixed the amps, he counted the cash, he jostled, he criticised, he cheered, he watched as the spark became a flame, all the while blowing on it until it became a bonfire.

RIP Richard.